Mr.T's Blog

    This week for our last international meal (or maybe it was second to last) and we had I think the best meal so far with some Moroccan Tangier lamb on a bed of seasoned couscous with pomegranate and some spiced so vide Zucchini slices and corn bread. My team made little ground beef Briouats well seasoned with chopped pistachios wrapped in phyllo dough with humus sauce as an appetizer. I was very pleased with how that turned out. The dessert was a very interesting Date filled with almond paste, rich chocolate cake, vanilla biscuit dipped in chocolate and a cranberry reduction. The lamb was unlike anything I had tasted before, similar to stewed roast beef but distinctly different, and the entire thing was very nicely present and received by the guests. 

   The dinner on Thursday was also very good, the highlight for me being the smoked chicken breast on the main plate. It was the first time I had eaten anything that had been recently smoked in the new smoker and it was done just right. Small chicken breasts smoked for one hour and they had a nice pink smoke layer about 1 centimeter deep that imparted plenty of flavour without being overwhelming. My team was on pastry for that day and we made a sponge cake with Dulce de leche wrapped up into it, people loved it. 

    Lately I’ve been getting back in form with the habit of selecting singular basic foodstuffs to provide tasty coverage of my full days food needs. I’ve been eating a lot of sandwiches, I always have bread and I always have deli meat and I can always whip up a mayo based hot sauce. Then what I discovered is that if you put this basic sandwich in the oven low at about 280 for 10 minutes everything melts together and the bread turns to light toast soaked with all that sauce and meat juice. Suddenly you have a much tastier and more satisfying hot sandwich that can be adapted easily with cheese or egg or other meats to fit breakfast lunch or dinner. It’s cheap, quick to make, highly adaptable, and hot. Perfect pick me up for winter time. 

    Taking a completely different autobiographical turn here to the weekend where I got super lost in Saint John on Friday. It was my good fortune to be invited to a birthday party of a classmate and friend of mine and I’m always down for a party. It was gonna be late getting down, hopefully by 9:30PM and going out until 2. That's a pretty solid amount of bar time, or so I thought. The drive down was pretty relaxed and uneventful, driving with a friend and two other friends in another car, I had the route mapped to my phone (but with no data for updates). Getting into Saint John was no problem, but soon after we pulled off the suggested rout only minutes before our exit and descended into the belly of downtown Saint John. Now I have no right to speak with authority about Saint John as a community, but the street layout is not conducive to very dark nights, and soon we were going in circles until the lead car pulled over to wait for another friend getting off work. No big deal but we were lost and time was ticking by. Soon it was about 10:30 and we were off again, I didn't know where to but the others had said they would lead. Then a couple cars got between us and my lead took off past a red light and I was stuck watching them go off to disappear in an unknown direction. I drove in a circle and then parked in some sketchy neighborhood as frantic phone calls were made to no avail. Luckily the friend with me hooked me up with some new GPS coordinates and I was off again. Oh this is a one way street that is also an exit for a highway, cool, speed in reverse, and we are back in business. Anyway it all ended up fine, we arrived much later but were fed with some delicious spring rolls and rice and noodles when we arrived. Getting home was also a bit of a wild ride but all in all, no collisions so it was a good night. 

    Lastly I just want to note that the lack of snow is welcome, and that the wind which has whipped up this past week has not been. This is my first winter ever on the coast and I’m very curious as to weather or not the wind and snow patterns will be the same as up in the river valley. So far it seems to be milder but the wind is downright violent at time. Can’t wait to see what comes next. Just kidding, I can wait. 

And I can’t say why. I think it has to do with the chronic lack of both “hot” hot sauces and good ground beef in the banquet cooking I’ve been doing in school thus far. It makes total sense to be sure, especially from a training standpoint for a banquet setting- burgers are both basic and relatively expensive compared to pork, hot sauce of any kind (let alone the good kind) is probably a bad choice with all the older folks who tend to frequent banquets being typically conservative in taste. So, two of my favorite culinary experiences are taking a significant backseat and I think its time to highlight some of my recent extra curricular encounters with both. 

    First let us consider the humble cheeseburger, an item often overlooked and considered basic by some more traditional chefs, but that I find instead to be one of the simplest most delicious and accessible foods ever assembled. First off you have all your most important food groups, cheese meat and bread, and its all in homogeneous cross sections for your busy on the go life. As simple as cheddar ground beef and buns all the way up to.....well anything that will fit between two buns. Every culture has their easy convenience meal on the go foods, falafels, gyros, meat pies, baozi, but I think its been scientifically proven that burgers are the best of them all. 

    Now for hot sauces. Many people don't understand the power of hot sauce, especially here in eastern Canada where the deep French English and Irish roots often lack any sort of hot sauce. What it does for food is similarly important to what salt and pepper do for food, that is that it adds an instant complexity of flavour which is especially important for otherwise boring and bland food. Anything fried, rice, salads, as dipping sauce for meats, and for bland freezer meals, putting a little sauce on it takes it to a whole other level. The key is finding a sauce that isn't too hot for what your eating and with a flavour that you enjoy. I tend to go for vinegar based sauces that are relatively hot, and right now the two I’m enjoying are Franks red hot extra hot and traditional Peri Peri by wildly delicious. The franks is an amplified version of their very mild flagship sauce, smoky cayenne goodness I find goes good with beef or on burgers, and the Peri Peri is a more intense and lingering burn with a nice smooth lemon and garlic base. 

This week was one spend catching up on sleep, catching up on chores, and catching up with friends and family. My parents came down last Saturday, took me out to lunch and dropped off some groceries, and that really set the stage for my lazy week. Regular classes were sidelined Monday and Tuesday for a speech at the Algonquin and Halloween fun, and the dinners we served Wednesday and Thursday both went off without any issues. I was able to take a break from some of the usual homework, sleep in, get my laundry done, sweep clean and generally tidy the house; all mundane little chores that weigh me down no longer.

    I was also lucky enough to spend Wednesday night celebrating with a bunch of my foolish classmates which was a good bit of fun, I wont get into too much detail but there were lots of laughs, spilled drinks, confused patrons, gambling, and good old paid for juke box tunes. The best part was, we all made it to class in the morning! Moderation is key you see, its a lesson learned with age. 

    One area of constant struggle however is my work at the Algonquin. I find it to be a confusing environment and the fact that I am a know nothing practicum student really stands out. Little things from using the wrong coloured cloths or putting something in the wrong fridge to more substantial issues of not correctly identifying equipment or keeping pace on the line, It’ s just worrying how much more I have to learn and become competent at before I will be any good in a kitchen. I really hope slow and steady is indicative of a winning approach, because its certainly mine. 

This week was my first since this culinary course started about two months ago that I felt confident and at ease during both of the banquet services. Things are coming together faster, people are individual speeding up, the dish pit is still a shit storm most days but otherwise It was a pleasant relaxing week. It is my humble opinion that cooks and clean staff should be separate people anyway, for the record. The highlight for me was frying my first donuts for the spooky Halloween themed desert on Thursday, it is surprisingly touchy to cook them through without burning either side. 

Friday was my first 8 hour shift at the Algonquin, nothing to note but several 5 gallon buckets of chopped veg. Fast forward to Saturday and I'm up at the gigantic Atlantic Superstore in Saint Stephen. I’ve been to several Superstores before, but this one was special. Not only was it larger than most, but the inventory was amazing. The produce was all in beautiful shape, even oddball veg like ghost peppers, red pears, dragon fruit, all like it was picked that day. A wall of chips most of which I’d never seen, and a hot sauce section that almost made me tear up. Needless to say I spent way too much money, and am very happy I did. I’ve learned the 9$ price for a little log of goat cheese is worth it, that Tzatziki is universally awesome, and that Peri Peri chili sauce is veri veri hot. I suppose my grocery bill just permanently went up now that I’ve found this place, oh well. 

    This past Friday the class and I set off for an evening function at the Huntsman Marine Aquarium just outside of St Andrews. Pretty early on in the day, which began slowly enough at 11am, I realized that we were using some pretty expensive ingredients and decided that this dinner was going to be perhaps the best. Fragua mousse hors d'oeuvres, deep fried goat cheese fritters, smoked salmon rolls, lobster tails, balsamic vinegar caviar, ect.

    Besides the beautiful ingredients and finished products, I am pretty proud of how well my class members and I did with plating it all. It seemed to me that the finished plates where much more identical than some of our past attempts, and I didn’ t hear much yelling or smashing plates so that’s also good. There was also a seal tank in the prep room which was a nice surprise I suppose you only ever find at an Aquarium.

     Compared to the dinner we did at Kingsbrae last weekend, I think everyone is much more aware of their roles and how to work as a team now, which isn’ t surprising except for how fast the growth seems to be. I’m pleasantly surprised to find that even a couple months and a few dinners in I can already see myself doing this sort of thing as a long term job. Hell, maybe even a career.

    I have noticed a few interesting inconveniences in the general life a chef at work that I would like to bring up however. Both at Kingsbrae and Huntsman Aquarium people were sending main courses back uneaten because their red meat was too red. In both cases (duck and steak), the meat was cooked perfectly, but it is certainly something to be aware of that if you serve red meat it would be best to have a way too cook it well to order if and when people ask. The other thing is the prevalence and seriousness of real world allergies and vegetarians. I know about the common food allergies of course, and that some people have certain dietary restrictions by choice, but until I started serving banquet meals I didn’t realize that those people together make up about 5 to 10% of us. A few vegetarians and a few allergies mixed in with 60 or 80 or 100 people doesn’t sound like much but its enough to ensure that you need to always be on the lookout for cross contamination. It seems to me it would be very easy to accidentally give a guest something they shouldn’t have, and so it makes sense that the head chefs are usually pretty protective of special request meals. All good things to keep in mind going forward. 

http://www.huntsmanmarine.ca/

    So this weekend I finally got my first taste of what event catering is like when I volunteered at the local Indulge food festival here in Saint Andrews. On Friday I was making and serving donairs on the street corner, and on Saturday I served seared scallops in a white wine butter sauce and an appetizer as part of a 5 course meal at Kingsbrae gardens. Both days were hard work far outside of my comfort zone and consisted of dealing with the public in delivering a constant rapid stream of semi consistent looking products.

    So on Friday I’m making donairs on the street corner like I had said, dude beside me dropping hot donair meat onto the sauced tortillas, lettuce, tomato onion, on to the wrapping guy, send off to consumer. Rinse repeat rinse repeat over and over at least ten dozen times. Every once and I while I even have a chance to look up and see the person(s) standing there talking to me and wow are there ever a lot of them. Emergency lettuce run, emergency tomato run, scratch that, steal tomatoes from Noah ect. Then the crowd thins and we run out of meat and the game is over. It was all a whirlwind of activity and from what I could gather people were happy with their food. Thank you god. 

Saturday was different, I got the easy job of searing scallops for a gathering of wine lovers. Wine lovers also love scallops, so that was an easy crowd to please even with my lack of scallop cooking experience, which until that point had been zero. After those were gone the class and I headed into the prep tent to help the Kingsbrae staff prepare their 5 course meal for their 180 or so guests. That was stressful only in a second hand kind of way because some people were losing it and some didn't really know what was going on (us). A bit like when your siblings is being yelled at for something you did and you feel a little bit of fear but mostly just relief that you’re not involved in the details. 

     So I’ve been taking culinary arts at Saint Andrews for a month now; its been enjoyable and its been a fast introduction into what seems to be a fast paced industry. Fast and busy doesn’t bother me in terms of a job, all the better to blink away a decade or two in the madness of routine, the faster the better I say! However, in terms of what is right for ourselves and our customers, certainly what is fun and fulfilling, we must all consider the importance a slower pace has on any finished product. Though our meals may be transient pleasures for our guests, the memories of them should not be.

  Of course I'm being rather unfair, starting out on the ground level one is not expected or required to be artistic, but rather help to fulfil the vision of someone more mature and recognized in the industry. My worry I suppose is more basic in that the workload and frenzied pace, which I am quickly seeing is the norm, actually degrades any individuals chances and outcomes for success. How is one supposed to provide novel experiences if they are trained for repetition? How does one work safely for themselves and their guests when they work so fast and so frequently? How does one justify the effort put into their work and call themselves a chef when they have only enough time to eat supper from the freezer before bed every night? I suspect it is as with many other industries simply a grind to the top, but for me, id rather shoot a little lower if I need grind myself a little less.